The crisis of leadership

Note the magnitude of the challenge. The economy is shrinking and regressing in real terms. Our human resource indices are dismal. A large percentage of our school-going children are out of school. On health we spend meagerly and what is allocated is frittered or pilfered. Most allocations remain unutilised since no plans exist to beneficially use them. The annual Budget is only a perfunctory exercise since most expenditures are already pre-determined in obligatory debt repayments — this in a fragile economy and a society in drift. The economy is agriculture based but merely subsistence level. Others have turned it into a niche, graduated to industrial levels and built on it. We are unable to even meet our staple needs. We are instead a net importer of wheat.

Few elements of treating agriculture as an industry include comprehensive land record and its ownership separating state land from private possession. Zoning, based on climatic determination and domestic needs for staples and cash crops, comes next. Necessary incentives for croppers and farmers help keep the crop strategy focused. Seed development suitable to different growing seasons and rapidly changing climatic conditions needs to be pursued. Industry connected to crops for value-addition is also required. Similarly, urbanisation as a trend needs to be better planned and restricted to defined zones without eating into agriculturally productive lands. Forests and replacement crops based on weather and import-replacement need to be instituted. State land can be best utilised for this purpose. Water preservation and its efficient utilisation is a priority need.

It needs a coordinated, cooperative and integrated mechanism and planning under a team and a leader with specialised knowledge in these areas. We don’t seem to have one man who can envision such short to mid-term strategy which can add beneficially to the economy reducing our import and thus the debt burden accruing out of rising deficits. Same holds true for industry, which must be the largest employer of labour. Agriculture is instead. This correlation needs to be reversed for us to move the economy up the ladder. Governments need to introduce sustainable, long-term policies which can make investment in these areas predictive, reliable and fruitful. Red-Tape inhibits induction of capital and must be expressly removed to ease induction.

Modernisation of production technologies will upgrade our products, making them more competitive. Inputs need to be regulated and better supplied at competitive prices. This will need a wholesome reform to our energy mix and distribution mechanisms. The ‘black hole’ which is the ‘circular debt’ — already of astronomical proportions — will need to be plugged. The energy minister, an erudite productive thinker, can surely develop some solution to a rapidly engorging inferno. What is it that is not known or understood by our political leadership to turn the economy around? It needs drastic changes to the matrices which are proven failures? Identifying markets and suiting products to them should guide anyone seeking to earn foreign exchange. Is it willful neglect? Or apathy? Or a mindset which is restrictive?

So, in services. Which are the money spinners? IT? What have we done to enable our unemployed youth with training workshops and related education and training to enable them to be productive contributors to the economy? The unskilled and the not so well educated can be taught skills in hospitality and nursing for markets in the Middle East. Why have we not been able to upgrade from the base labour to a more skilled labour category? Surely, there is enough literature guiding enhancement of skills to fill labour markets to earn precious foreign exchange.

Instead, the prime minister uses all his time and energy in maligning a feared political opposite. Never has one heard him address what ails the economy or the society. His recourse is always simple and convenient. He wants to borrow more to defray more — a defeating proposition. He never talks of growing more or producing more and how. That is our dilemma — purposeless politics, which is uninitiated, uneducated, self-centered, power-hungry, with a fetish for aggrandisement. Weak intellectual understanding of political purpose makes it power-centred than service driven. Traditional politics hides behind tolerance, servile acceptance and mutual accommodation feeding status quo and shuns newer or more progressive political approaches suitable to twenty-first century needs in both economy and the society.

Vision is what we outright lack in leadership. Sincerity, or the lack of it, and requisite empathy to relate to the lowest levels of society and their needs is what are clearly absent. Personal, familial or tribal interest drives most consideration. Given that some percentage of the allocations will be pilfered away for personal gain yet the rest is not used for public benefit. What is, is usually a cover for what is stolen, which is most. Legislation only benefits the already rich and powerful elites. The disparity in the haves and the have-nots is yawning causing disruptions and turmoil in society.

If debt and deficits are what keep a government going, they are not averse to passing the buck on to the next to deal with. The latest proclivity among political parties to laden an economy with deliberate missteps and burdens encumbers incoming governments, making governance impossible. In such polarised aversion of the other the innocent majority reels under the consequences. The rupee lost its value kicking in near-hyperinflation and an unbearable cost of basic living. There must be a way out of this bedeviling situation. A default on our obligations beckons. Rather than investigate how may the nation or its government chart a path out, we are imbued with political machinations to purposeless ends.

Five hundred families are the repository of the 1142 members who represent their constituencies in the five legislative assemblies. And that’s the rub. They mostly rely on their dynastic influence to keep representation restricted to within those families. Even when they lose an election they have lost to another similar family of dynastic politics. This see-saw of power between the selected few has disenfranchised the remaining 99.9 per cent of the nation who remain patently neglected and left to their own fate. A nation thus winds down to what looks like a sorry end. Going by the daily pressers and the goings-on in parliament though, one may think our most immediate threat is a person or a party on the opposing end.

The entire system of governance needs to be reconstituted but special interests never let anyone move in that direction. We thus live on spare oxygen in the system. The last time leadership was found short we lost half the country; this time round we need to ensure it will not be the rest. We remain desperately short of caliber needed to save the country and its people from such ends.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, June 16^th, 2023.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.